At the very outset the sight of peasants, men and women, unconcernedly at work in the fields gathering the harvest, struck me as strange and unnatural. The men were either old or well advanced in middle age. Everywhere women, girls, and mere lads were working. The first sign of war was the demolished villa of a Catholic priest at a village near Ransbach. This priest had lived there for many years, engaged in religious work and literary pursuits. After the outbreak of the war the German authorities jumped at the conclusion that he was an agent of the French Secret Service and that he had been in the habit of sending to Belfort information concerning German military movements and German measures for defense--very often by means of carrier pigeons. The Alsatians say that these accusations were utterly unjust; but last week a military party raided the priest's house, dragged him from his study, placed him against his own garden wall and shot him summarily as a traitor and spy. The house was searched from top to bottom, and numerous books and papers were removed, after which the building was destroyed by dynamite. The priest was buried without a coffin at the end of his little garden plot, and some of the villagers placed a rough cross on the mound which marked the place of interment. In the next large village we were told that it had been successively occupied by French and German troops and had been the scene of stiff infantry fighting. Here we found groups of old men and boys burying dead men and horses, whose bodies were already beginning to be a menace to health. The weather here has been exceptionally hot, and the countryside is bathed in blazing sunshine. Further on were a number of German soldiers beating about in the standing crops on both sides of the road, searching for dead and wounded. They said many of the wounded had crawled in among the wheat to escape being trodden upon by the troops marching along the road, and also to gain relief from the heat. On the outskirts of another large village we saw a garden bounded by a thick hedge, behind which a company of French infantry had taken their stand against the advancing German troops. Among the crushed flowers there were still lying fragments of French soldiers' equipments, two French caps stained with blood and three torn French tunics, likewise [Transcriber: original 'liewise'] dyed red. The walls of the cottage bore marks of rifle bullets, and the roof was partially burned. Passing through the villages we saw on all sides terrible signs of the devastation of war--houses burned, uncut grain trodden down and rendered useless, gardens trampled under foot; everywhere ruin and distress.